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In 2019, Swedish startup Einride became the first company in the world to operate a driverless electric truck on a public road. Unlike many of its competitors, it had no safety driver on board — although it was supervised remotely by a human who could take over the controls at any time.
Five years on, the market for autonomous trucks is worth over $35 billion, according to Fortune Business Insights, and is projected to more than double by 2032. The road has been rough for some of the early players in the sector, like San Diego-based TuSimple, which delisted from NASDAQ and exited the US market to focus on China, and San Francisco-based Embark, which laid off 70% of its employees and was acquired by Applied Intuition.
However, things still appear to be running smoothly for Einride, which topped $3.6 billion in contracts last year, and at the end of 2022, when startup funding was in strong decline, obtained $500 million in financing.
The company operates thousands of trucks in seven countries, including Sweden, the UK and the US, and now it is adding the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to its roster, after signing a deal with the 11th busiest container port in the world, Dubai’s Jebel Ali, to build what Einride founder Robert Falck says will be the world’s largest autonomous trucking network.
“Hardware and technology agnostic”
The agreement — between Einride and DP World, one of the world’s largest port operators — will lead to a fully electric fleet of trucks in the port, some of which will be also autonomous. Einride is currently running tests, with operations set to start in October.
By the end of the year, the company hopes to achieve about 1,600 daily “container movements,” which it says would result in a saving of 14,600 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, the equivalent of removing about 3,000 gas-powered passenger cars from the road.
“It’s a groundbreaking contract,” Falck said. “I would say the most intriguing proof of concept and on-scale application of electric and autonomous transport systems in the world. The region has the potential to be on the frontier of this.”
At scale, the port will have a fleet of 100 electric trucks, connected through Einride’s digital operating system, called Saga, which uses AI to optimize efficiency by selecting the best route for every job, saving energy. In practical terms, Falck said, this means moving from “a single truck driver’s logic” and replacing it with a robotic system. “We’ve taken a different route compared to other autonomous players in that we (Einride) have been obsessed with creating magical AI, optimizing transport and a gradual transition into making this change happen,” he added.
This software component is equipped on both of the company’s offerings — electric trucks with a driver inside, or cabless trucks that are fully autonomous. But this distinction doesn’t warrant too much focus, according to Falck. “We actually only have one product, and that’s transport capacity,” he said. “At the core, what we sell is transporting goods from point A to point B. We are hardware and technology agnostic. We don’t sell the technology itself, we sell the service.”
He makes a comparison to Apple, which designs its products in the US and then outsources the manufacturing to Chinese firms. In much the same way, Falck said, Einride provides hardware specifications to existing third party manufacturers — including established names in commercial vehicle production, like Sweden’s Scania — and then provides its own clients with software and services to operate the resulting vehicles.
Autonomous rising
The deal follows another collaboration, signed last year with the UAE’s Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, to deploy a “freight mobility grid” called Falcon Rise along a 240-mile stretch across Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah.
The project involves the deployment of 2,000 electric trucks and 200 autonomous electric ones, which will make use of eight charging stations along the stretch, and is meant to connect key infrastructure areas such as ports, airports and industrial areas. It’s currently in the early stages of development.
At scale, Falcon Rise will have roughly one autonomous truck for every 10 in the fleet, but for now, Einride is taking a more conservative approach. “Out of our total installed capacity (globally), I would say that 2 to 3% is autonomous,” Falck said. “But in five years, I would say that will rise to 20 to 25%. And 15 years down the line, 40 to 50%.”
Its current proportion of autonomous trucks may sound limited, but according to Falck, taking it slowly has been the secret to Einride’s success. “What we did differently from the beginning was to say, we’re not going to go for full autonomous at night, on 90 kilometer-per-hour freeways, in big cities everywhere,” he said.
“Instead, we said, we’re going to go between two warehouses, at low speeds, and start there. Because in [freight] transport there’s actually a business case for that. And that way, you can safely learn and develop and take it step by step — you can call it the toddler approach.”